Hillary Clinton is prepared for an interview with Larry King in 2000.
Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters

Typical Hillary Clinton, many scoffed, not telling the media for two days she was sick with pneumonia until video emerged of her nearly collapsing as she left a 9/11 memorial event on Sunday.

Clinton is heading back to the campaign trail for a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday. A theme of the 2016 election is Clinton’s supposed hatred of the press, as seen in her avoidance of press conferences and her pool of reporters. But a study of Clinton’s press interactions offers at least one reason why the Democratic nominee is not too keen to share intimate details about her life unless absolutely necessary: the coverage has been overwhelmingly sexist for decades.

From the beginning of her career in the public eye, Clinton has been dogged by questions about her interest in homemaking – despite her own successful career. The queries gradually became more subtle, but the concern of her interviewers was often the same: is this woman “womanly” enough?

“You’re not a native. You’ve been educated in liberal eastern universities. You’re less than 40. You don’t have any children. You don’t use your husband’s name. You practice law. Does it concern you that maybe other people feel that you don’t fit the image that we’ve created for the governor’s wife in Arkansas?”

Clinton – who earned a doctor of law degree from Yale, was the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation, and was the first female partner at Rose Law Firm, the third oldest law firm in the US – handled the question with panache while sporting a huge pair of spectacles in what was the style of the time.

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“I think that each person should be assessed and judged on that person’s own merits. I’m not 40 but that hopefully will be cured by age, eventually I will be,” she quips.

“That doesn’t bother me, and I hope that it doesn’t bother very many people. I think in a way it’s kind of a tribute to the state that someone who may or may not fit an image is accepted on her own terms.”

The interviewer – he is called Jack – lobs another question.

“One gets the impression that you’re really not all that interested possibly in state dinners and teas and garden parties?”

Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas for 12 years before being elected president in 1992. His election birthed the famed war between the Clintons and the media.

“There was a hostility that seemed to emerge in that compare and contrast,” said Tammy R Vigil, an assistant professor of communication studies at Boston University who is working on a book about the role of political spouses during campaigns.

“Right out of the gate she was getting slammed for the pantsuits, the hair, the headbands, her appearance, her life choices, and everything she said was so heavily scrutinized. I think she became defensive. And now she’s trying not to be as defensive, but it’s sort of still there,” Vigil said.

Barbara Bush fit into the expected norm for presidential wives, a sweet southern lady who spent her life raising children. Clinton was an ambitious working mother.

Right out of the gate she was slammed for the pantsuits, the hair, the headbands, her appearance, her life choices

Tammy R Vigil

“The Republicans in 1992 were using terms like ‘feminazi’, claiming she wanted to destroy the fabric of the American family because she wasn’t a stay-at-home mom,” Vigil said.

The media tried to make Clinton into the traditional first lady they were accustomed to while criticizing her for not being it, starting the idea that Clinton is disingenuous. As Vigil explains, “There’s been kind of a weird way of making her fit into the traditional mold but trying to prove that she doesn’t, by discrediting her because she isn’t a good woman who doesn’t fit the traditional mold. There’s no way of winning that contest. If she says, ‘I love my child’, people say, ‘Yeah, but you work the whole time’.”

Clinton pushed herself as an independent and ambitious woman – and the heat she got for it burnt her.

In a 60 Minutes interview with husband Bill during the 92 campaign, she was quizzed about his supposed infidelity, and Clinton famously responded: “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”

Which offended country singer Wynette, who told Clinton via the press she should appear with her in an interview to defend those remarks.

“I can assure you, in spite of your education, you will find me to be just as bright as yourself,” said Wynette, a dig at Clinton’s Ivy League education and high-powered career.

Even Clinton’s response to Wynette’s response was covered negatively, although her reaction was not very media-savvy.

“Mrs Clinton rolled her eyes and slapped her forehead when told of Wynette’s reaction Tuesday during a meeting with the editorial board of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel,” reported the Associated Press at the time.

Shortly afterwards, when defending her own legal career, Clinton declared: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

Cue horror from conservatives and stay-at-home mothers, who saw it as a dismissal of their life choices and lambasted her for it – although the full Clinton quote continued: “The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed … to assure that women can make the choices, whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.”

“Do you like doing stuff, Hillary, like saying: ‘Oh, I like that yellow table cloth with the red napkins!’ or whatever?” Couric asked Clinton. “Or looking at the centerpiece or things like that. Is that fun to you?”

“Yes. It is fun to me. I’m not in any way an expert,” said Clinton, laughing.

Couric goes on to ask Clinton why she is seen as a “threatening person” and “about the comparisons to Lady Macbeth”.

In 1993, Spy magazine ran a manipulated photo of Clinton as a dominatrix on the cover, with the headline What Hillary Problem?.

Hillary Clinton on Spy magazine in 1993. Photograph: Spy Magazine

“The first lady has emasculated America. I guess that is what radical feminists always wanted to do, but when the Bobbitt syndrome hits the only superpower left in the world, it’s not only the Mr Bobbitts who are in pain. We all are,” wrote columnist Barbara Amiel in Macleans magazine, referring to the famous 1993 incident where Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis.

This treatment from the early days under the national spotlight – and it worsened when Clinton tried and failed to push healthcare legislation in 1993 – is one reason Clinton’s relationship with the media remains testy. Who wants to engage with an industry that has publicly humiliated you for years?

“There’s no rational reason why a center-left Democratic traditional candidate running the campaign she’s running would generate so much animosity ... it’s only explained if you look at the decades that go back,” Boehlert said.

But the idea that she avoids the press during this election because she hates them isn’t fair, he adds, explaining that he thinks the press simply isn’t her priority.

“She’d much rather spend her time trying to communicate with voters, I think the press senses that and gets offended by that,” Boehlert said.

He also contrasts Trump’s treatment of the press in this campaign. “She respects their role. She’s not banning people from her rally, not insulting them in every speech, she doesn’t herd them into metal pens, and yet the press seems to be upset with her. They don’t seem to be upset at Trump,” Boehlert said.

He also notes that when Clinton wasn’t covered by the DC beltway press, such as during her time as secretary of state when the diplomatic press reported on her, the reporting on her was more neutral and favorable. Vigil points out the same thing happened during her time as a US senator for New York, when it was mainly local press focusing on her work.

No one is asking Clinton about napkins these days, but that doesn’t mean the sexism has gone. “Within the beltway press, the sexism has become more nuanced condescension,” Boehlert said.

Presidents have also had much more serious health crises far before Clinton came down with a bout of pneumonia. Franklin D Roosevelt wore leg braces and could barely walk when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932, before becoming entirely paralyzed. John F Kennedy had Addison’s disease. Both health issues were rarely covered in the media.

“Yet Hillary Clinton had pneumonia, didn’t share it for two days and it was the biggest crime of the century. I can understand being defensive if I’m her,” Vigil said.